Here are a couple of reviews of Mr & Mrs Nieve's opera Welcome to the Voice, starring Sting and Elvis Costello, at Paris's Théâtre du Châtelet.

First up, Le Figaro:

The look is halfway between that of an Eighties advert - when a sax player leans against a wall, cap on head, to deliver an irksome refrain - and cheap musical comedy. But the worst is yet to come. The threshold of pain is reached when Elvis Costello comes out, in the role of a police chief packing a mean Taser. Inaudible on his own records ever since he took singing lessons, the poor thing wanders all over the place despite his best efforts, incapable of getting a single note right in any of his appearances on stage.

Thirty years after setting out, Costello is stuck in a dead end, and you have to wonder what could be next for a voice that was once one of the most eloquent in pop. Next to him, Sting seems a model of sobriety, such is the extent of the shipwreck. The only good thing about this destitute, overblown spectacle is that it has enough good taste not to go on for ever. After an hour and a half, you can get on with your life again.

Hmm. But Le Figaro is a notoriously right-wing rag, so let's try the somewhat Indy-friendlier Le Monde in the hope of finding a more sympathetic appraisal of what must surely have been a magnifique evening out:

Nieve, Costello’s piano player, drags out all the clichés of opera [...] and his brush is broad: cut-and-paste Piazzolla, Honegger, Bizet, Wagner, Bartok, Sondheim, Knell, Weill, a drop of shakuhachi flute, monotonous Eastern chanting, etc. The whole thing is dressed up in amplified reverb whose wetness only serves to thicken the soup of this whole sorry affair. Sting is raucous but intense, giving it his all as if he believed in it, but Elvis Costello is a vocal catastrophe and the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris is mediocre.

The four opera singers (Sylvia Schwartz, Marie-Ange Todorovitch, Sonya Yoncheva, Anna Gabler) are fine.

Oops, alors.